Josh Norem
2024-03-28 10:34:53
www.extremetech.com
Intel’s Lunar Lake architecture will be the low-power follow-up to its current Meteor Lake platform for mobile devices. Due later this year, this new architecture will target ultra-portable laptops, handhelds, tablets, and similar hardware. It’s now been photographed for the first time, showing it’s a whole different kettle of fish for Intel, with several huge first-time advancements for the company.
German site Igor’s Lab received a photo of an engineering sample of Lunar Lake and some engineering slides, revealing it will be Intel’s first CPU with DDR memory on the package, similar to Apple’s M-series chips. You may recall that Intel released a photograph of Meteor Lake with on-package memory late last year and then deleted it. However, the CPU in the picture looked the same as the one we’re looking at today, so maybe that was Lunar Lake all along. Regardless, Igor confirms this CPU features a 4+4 design, which was also previously rumored, so it’ll have four Lion Cove P-cores and four Skymont E-cores.
It looks like the days of there being upgradable memory on Windows laptops might be coming to an end soon, at least for ultra-portable devices.
Credit: Igor’s Lab
Igor also confirmed that this Lunar Lake chip features a compute tile made by TSMC on its 3nm process. This is the first time Intel has handed off chip-making duties to its bitter rival, marking a surprising turnaround for the company. Obviously, it previously made its own CPUs, but now that it’s in the era of tile-based designs, it has still been making the compute tile at its own fabs, at least on Meteor Lake.
Intel was reportedly planning on using its 18A process for this architecture, but it might not be ready until later this year when Lunar Lake is expected to ship. It’s unclear if Arrow Lake for desktop, which is supposed to use Intel 20A, will have its compute tile made by Intel or TSMC.
Intel has notably removed the I/O die from Lunar Lake, which is due in late 2024.
Credit: Igor’s Lab
The new report also states that Intel has been working with Microsoft to optimize Lunar Lake for Windows, which sounds like some kind of AI-based thing to us. Igor’s report uses anodyne language about “optimizing software-hardware interactions,” which to us just means “running Windows,” but we’re almost positive there’s an AI angle to this joint venture.
Finally, the iGPU is reportedly a Battlemage chip, Intel’s second-generation Arc graphics. Igor states the slides he saw “internal tests” showing it’s powerful enough to deliver 2X the performance of its Alchemist predecessor, which certainly sounds promising in a thin-and-light package. It reportedly has eight Xe2 cores, placing it in the same category as an entry-level discrete GPU from the Alchemist family.